World Harvest: a Graphic Novella
November 18th, 2008
Something I have to own up to at the moment is a project that has been burning in me for some time. I’m writing a graphic novella - sort of like a grown up comic book with real plot - titled World Harvest. As a work in progress, it’s only just moving from the conceptual stages into production of the initial frames and text but I’m happy enough with it’s progress to give you the heads up.
World Harvest is a dark grungey story about a man in a prison cell looking back on where we have been. So it’s set in about 2020. How exactly did the hero wind up isolated from the world in a cell for 21 years? For murder, no less. And what has it got to do with the way our culture is being eroded by the State? Did we lose our rights or were they handed over willingly by the population? The war against terrorism has quickly transformed into the war against citizens.
Add to the legal and societal pressures currently impacting us, we’re also moving to a more ubiquitous environment - small computers tapping into our internet enabled things. We’re moving towards improved surveillance, smarter systems, a One Machine World Wide Web that is the new level of reality. None of this is free, friends. We’ve been playing with the social A-Bomb for a while. And that semantic web will take good men and women to keep it on track. Just like we’re currently seeing with copyfight.
I’m not sure how I’ll publish World Harvest but it should wind up at around the novella length (touch wood) considering it’s highly graphic and will be released over a long period. I considered running it as a periodical on it’s own site but maybe that would just be too time consuming. I’d expect the first installment to come out as a PDF download here in the near future. Just out of interest, here’s a sneak mockup of World Harvest’s first screen… it should give you an idea of the mood of the work.
